I was surprised by the strange blend of naivety and unswerving professionalism that is to be found in Shoesmith. Despite holding a position of responsibility and being reasonably experienced in her role, she repeatedly emphasises her shock at how fast and how viciously the the fallout of Baby P’s death ballooned into a grotesque circus of media outrage. She also mentions that she didn’t anticipate that the case would be used as ammunition by political parties.

However, she insists that at Haringey all the right boxes were ticked and all the correct procedures were followed, before and after the death of Baby P. Nonetheless, Baby P slipped through the net, and a subsequent independent Ofsted report revealed some worrying things about the running of Haringey childrens’ services.

Hearing things from her perspective, you get a sense of the huge gulf that must have existed between the narrative being expertly woven by Baby P’s carers, perhaps in collaboration, unconsciously or not, with social workers, doctors and nurses; and the truth.

That is what makes people angry, I think – when helplessness oozes from the people who should have been taking charge. Ultimately, it was Baby P’s mother, her boyfriend and a lodger who were convicted of the crime of murdering Baby P, but the thought that Baby P could have survived, if only somebody working with him and his mother had done something differently, will taunt us for a long time.

Despite attempting to take practical action in the aftermath of Baby P’s death, Shoesmith couldn’t do enough to save her job. She was eventually dismissed, ‘squashed between the press and politics’, as she describes it.

I think it’s easy to forget that people in positions of power, like Sharon Shoesmith, are human. It is not hard to criticise the organisations and professionals culpable in Baby P’s death, but that criticism quickly became personal, as it is wont to do when emotionally charged cases are brought to light by the media. People’s desire to understand what had happened became the thirst for a scapegoat.

Sharon Shoesmith comes across, most of all, as a person trying (and failing) to deal with a nightmare professional scenario. In many ways she seems detached from the case. The buck stopped with her – ultimately Baby P was her services’ responsibility, and therefore her responsibility – but her description of events leading up to the child’s death is littered with references to other organisations and peppered with phrases like ‘they must have done this’, and ‘I suppose they thought that’.

Her council’s response after Baby P’s death was better, more focused and sure of itself, but nonetheless mistakes were made. Haringey failed to get its point across successfully in the media and to members of the public. Perhaps if she had allowed herself to step out of the council bubble and become more aware of how the man in the street perceived the Baby P case, she might have weathered the storm better, but as soon as that damning Ofsted report was published, it was inevitable that her head would roll.